The fictional town of Fortune’s Favor, California was a very different place from Grantville, West Virginia.
Located within the equally fictitious Sage County it sat within the low mountains of the central Sierras, nestled in a bend of the Occidental River- a similarly non-existent tributary of the American River. Like so many towns in that part of the Golden State it had been originally founded by prospectors during the California Gold Rush of the 1850s, involving the dispossession of a local village of Yamani Maidu when it became apparent that they were sitting on some valuable gold deposits. Gold sustained the town’s economy through the early years, when that ran out in the latter half of the 19th century copper took its place. The Southern Pacific Railway put in a branch line to the town, linking it to the wider world and ensuring that when the copper began to run low the town was able to transition over to logging. Trees from the old growth forest of the Sierras were turned into finished boards in Sage County’s lumber mills and shipped east and west on the rails. Fortune smiled on Fortune’s Favor when the Dixon Company decided to locate a box factory in the mining town-turned-lumber-town and the jobs it brought kept the townsfolk working all through the Great Depression.
Fortune’s Favor reached its apex in the early 1960s with three lumber mills, the box factory, the Markey Copper Mine on its last legs, the train station, and a state highway connecting it to the interstate. For a time, it had a movie theatre, a high school (plus the Indian Boarding School for what was left of the Yamani Maidu in the area), five bars, six churches, a car dealership, and two dozen other major businesses providing goods and services to the men who worked the mills and the factory. The population passed five thousand persons, but they never did get around to incorporation and the town remained a mere census designated area. The future seemed as bright as one could reasonably to expect it to be.
When logging fell off in the 1980s it was the end of Fortune’s Favor’s good fortune.
The mine finally gave up the ghost in ’71, the box factory was torn down in ’80, and one by one the lumber mills shuttered their doors. The Indian Boarding School was closed as “kill the Indian save the man” policies were relegated to the history books. When a fire in ’86 destroyed the town’s train station the railway declined to rebuild it, citing the decline in traffic. The few remaining loggers in the area, whose custom had always been an important secondary driver of the local economy, weren’t enough to keep things going and stores began to close. There was still a lumber mill operating in the county seat of Mane, and the Devil’s Lake Rancheria of Maidu Indians opened a casino at Fortune’s Favor’s neighbor town (and football rival) Devil’s Lake. Inhabitants of the town went there for work, or else left the county entirely to seek work in Sacramento, Marysville, or as far afield as the Bay Area.
By the 21st century Fortune’s Favor was a dying town.
There were only six business of note on the main street; a gift shop/antique dealer who catered to the odd tourist who drifted over from the lake, a Dollar General, an automotive repair that also provided the only Triple A-certified towing service in that part of the county, an all-around handyman who did plumbing, electricity, and general repairs, the Pinetree bar, and a salon that offered nails and hair three days a week. Of these, only the bar and the Dollar General offered the possibility of employment to the general public, the rest were all worked by their owners (except for the automotive repair that was worked by its owner, his son, and when sober his younger brother). The high school had closed and the few remaining children of appropriate age attended the school half-an-hour away in Devil’s Lake- also the nearest source for gas, fresh groceries, and healthcare at the rancheria clinic. The two remaining churches were the Lutheran church that ran a food closet and an odd sort congregation called “Sun on the Summit” that had taken over the former Assembly of God building. Adherents to other Christian denominations could go to Devil’s Lake or Mane for services where a devotee could find churches for Catholics, Mormons, Baptists, Pentecostals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses (Sage County boasted no formal places of worship for its small number of non-Christians). Most in Fortune’s Favor were nominally either Lutheran or Catholic, but church attendance had been dropping steadily for years and outside of a devoted minority (a significant minority to be sure) the majority went only on Christmas, Easter, or for big events.
The only full-time government employees to work in Fortune’s Favor were the sole librarian of the small-town library, a trio of postal workers at the USPS office, and the janitor for the town hall (in the absence of a municipal government, the town hall was simply a public meeting place that hosted the odd communal event like the Spring Shindig). Law enforcement was provided by the sheriff’s substation in Devil’s Lake and an ex-Angeleno CHP officer who lived with his husband over in Dellville and was as gay as he was no-nonsense.
There were a few other small concerns in Fortune’s Favor that offered independent streams of income (including a fellow who made and sold his own beef jerky and a man who would spend two weeks a month in the woods panning and usually return with enough gold to cover his rent), but most of the inhabitants who worked found employment elsewhere and merely lived in the town. These included a couple of teachers at Devil’s Lake’s primary and secondary schools, some employees of the Walmart in Mane, and a number of persons willing to brave the near total absence of employee protections at a tribal casino, but the largest source of outside employment was actually farming. There were a number of farms and ranches in the western part of Sage County, and while hardly a major agricultural center the area returned steady yields- often to families who had been working the land since the 19th century. They frequently needed labor, most commonly for part-time work, but a man or woman who was a known quantity and had established the right relationships with the community could support themselves throughout the year doing odd jobs. Consequently, there were a sizeable number of townsfolk who were familiar with the work of farming, even if there were no farms or ranches within the town proper. The town did have a respectable little apple orchard (apples grew very well in Sage County and it seemed at times like every house in Fortune’s Favor, abandoned or not, had at least one apple tree) and something too small to call a farm but too large to call a garden tended by a friendly definitely-not-survivalist and his wife on top of a nicely defensible wooded hill off Old Wagon Road (there were also a handful of smaller gardens). A number of the inhabitants kept chickens, there was an apiarist with two dozen hives out by Okie Flat, and plenty of people had dogs and cats (horses, cattle, sheep, and goats all existed in close proximity but these were not normally kept in the town proper).
A majority of the townsfolk relied to some degree on government assistance and poverty was stark- a third of them lived below the poverty line and per capita income hovered around $10,000. It creates an unfairly critical picture to state that those who remained in the town did so because they either couldn’t or wouldn’t seek work elsewhere- a large chunk of the population had been born and raised there and refused to leave their home, quite of a few of these were older and retired in any case. There were fragments of a vibrant community- particularly among the ranch hands and the farm workers- and a number of persons who could go somewhere else if they wanted but preferred their small-town life in the Sierras. Most people you met would be friendly, free with a smile and a handshake, happy to make time for a conversation with anyone- even a “flatlander” up from the valley.
But then you had the men and women who were well and truly trapped.
Maybe they lacked the resources to search for employment elsewhere. Maybe they lacked the education or the skills to compete in a tight job market. Maybe they lacked the temperament to take orders from a boss. Maybe they had a criminal record or a physical disability or a mental illness. Often it was a combination of factors. There were people who would try to leave, only to reflexively self-sabotage opportunities that came their way out of… fear of change, maybe? Or comfort with what they had? Alcoholism and drug addiction were severe problems in Fortune’s Favor, particularly meth and opioids, adding an additional handicap to its remaining inhabitants. There was a sullen anger that clung to parts of the town, a bitterness at a world that had reduced so many of them to taking handouts they didn’t want to need and trod the life out of their community without seeming to notice. It was an anger that took itself out in little acts of desecration- vandalizing one of the empty houses, throwing a fist at someone else in a drunken tiff, or even laying hands on a spouse or a child.
I don’t want you to imagine a town full of drunken, abusive malcontents. That’s not who these people were, on the whole- even the addicts and alcoholics had plenty of human decency to go around.
But those sorts existed, and were all too common.
The people of Fortune’s Favor (less than a thousand by the 2020 census) did not participate much in politics. To be sure Sage County was part of Jesusland and had voted 55% for the orange tweeter that year, the town helping to deliver that result. But like the rest of rural California they had little chance of ever deciding a presidential result, or of making themselves heard in state-level politics dominated by the Bay Area and Greater Los Angeles. The GOP didn’t need the votes of Fortune’s Favor to win their solidly red congressional district, or their solidly red state senate and assembly seats, and it was hard to get excited about the local races. Still, even if few were active voters, the townsfolk had their political opinions and these were mostly conservative and Republican. They blamed left-wing environmentalists for killing the logging industry and for the unusually severe forest fires that California had been experiencing lately (“If they would just let us thin the forest properly, this wouldn’t be a problem!”) while considering China and Mexican Drug Cartels guilty for the opioid crisis. Many were gun owners and hostile towards talk of gun control, they considered big cities to be liberal-run dens of vice, corruption, violence, and crime. Visitors to Fortune’s Favor were greeted by a large sign in front of one property that proclaimed “It’s Time For 51” over the green double-crossed banner of the State of Jefferson, and the owner of the Pinetree kept a sign reading “Beware of Attack Republican” over the bar. Not too much in terms of full-on alt-right, but one occasionally saw a couple of trucks sporting the Greek helmet and Roman numeral “III” that indicated membership in Sage County’s chapter of the Three Percenter Militia.
That said, this was still California and 43% of Sage County had voted for the hair sniffer in 2020, and you didn’t have to look too hard to find liberals in Fortune’s Favor. The retired forest ranger and his wife always hosted a biannual fundraiser for the Democrats and had phone-banked during the last three presidential elections. The ex-school superintendent had no qualms about making known his scorn for the orange tweeter, nor did the ranch hand who had taken her job on the Anderson Ranch to escape a father who possessed every negative law enforcement stereotype you can imagine. One of the musicians in the Spring Shindig every year was a middle-aged transwoman who had been part of the community for so long that even the owner of the Pinetree didn’t misgender her out of simple politeness. The definitely-not-survivalist’s son had a poster of Lenin on his bedroom wall, and it wasn’t hard to find people who agreed that forest fires were at least partly the fault of global warming or that the rich so-and-so’s needed to pay their fair share of taxes.
(You would be hard pressed, however, to find anyone willing to defend the spotted owl)
There were many ways in which Fortune’s Favor was ill-equipped for an ISOT. It had no local government, no permanent law enforcement presence, no industry, no doctor or formal medical facilities, no school, no power plant, no large grocery store or large hardware store, a small population, a shortage of skilled labor, and no breeding populations of large domesticated animals.
On the other hand, it was not entirely lacking in advantages.
The town had a history of harsh winters and heavy snowfall, and consequently the buildings were well-insulated and most homes had functioning fireplaces. With the population having declined by over four thousand from its height there would be no shortage of housing for stranded people passing through, or townsfolk whose homes relied on electricity or fuel for heating. The winters were milder these days, but one could still rely on at least one or two periods of 72+ hours when a winter storm would knock out the power and shut down travel, and there was a time only a couple decades past when Fortune’s Favor used to find itself cut off from the outside world for weeks at a time. Under such circumstances you would notice if you were unprepared, and most inhabitants kept at minimum a week of food and bottled water at hand, to say nothing of flashlights, spare batteries, crank-powered lamps, crank-powered generators, first-aid kits, warm clothing, fire-starters, and much, much more.
The overpriced gear that suburbanites bought from survivalist websites to feed apocalyptic fantasies were the kind of things that the people of Fortune’s Favor could conceivably expect to need without the world ending, and those who could afford it were quite well equipped.
There were no doctors or formal medical facilities, but there were a number of people with first aid training (including both of the teachers), a couple of retired nurses, and some good books on the fundamentals of healthcare in the town library. Said library also had quite respectable collections on mining and logging, and- as this was a rural area- agriculture. Beyond that its collection of 15,000~ volumes offered at least a surface overview of most topics, although quite a few titles dated from when the town was larger and consequently were rather out of date. Outside of the public library there were a few private collections, most of which consisted of 30 books or fewer (in our modern society even people who almost never read will still have at least a couple books that they’ve accumulated over the years) but some were larger- the retired forest ranger and his wife had a library of 1,000+ titles. There was no shortage of persons with agricultural experience, hunting experience, or fishing experience. There were no less than three amateur gunsmiths and a few dozen military veterans. Basic carpentry tools and skills were widespread, logging skills and equipment less so but still present. There were good sources of scrap metal, particularly in “the Boneyard” where thirty-odd illegally abandoned cars were slowly rusting away. Much of the town got its water from wells and either used septic tanks or the relatively well-contained town sewer-system. If that failed, then there was always the nearby river for water.
In summary, Fortune’s Favor was well-equipped to easily meet the basic needs of its inhabitants post-ISOT- food, water, shelter, warmth, and (potentially) safety- but was ill-equipped to assert itself as a major political power like Grantville or Nantucket. Plus, there were a few surprises- a handful of people and things that the townsfolk would be lucky to have on hand. Maybe not as many as they would if they were larger, but fortune hasn’t totally given up on them.
In any case, while these details are important to know, the town of Fortune’s Favor is not really the primary focus of this story.
The people they’re going to meet are.
